Thursday, November 7, 2013

Overview
Today I learned of a web site called circumnews.com (server [46.28.65.179] also hosts sontores.com or inqueritopro.com which appear to be Russian and Portuguese versions of the same kind of thing). This site claims to pay you between $2 - $5 USD per article you read. There is no verification system to ensure users read the articles other than a (weak) bot protection system. They say that you must reach a minimum of $100 in order to get paid out and they will pay to a PayPal or Payza account. They claim that the site owners pay them and then they pay you 70% of what they make. Once you request your money, payments are supposed to be paid within 14 days. This has not been verified to actually happen.

A Potential Threat!
Personally, I have serious doubts about this kind of web site. Well it does not appear to be asking for more than your name (first and last), email, and your PayPal account, I speculate this is a system that provides them with a list of real PayPal (ecommerce) accounts, emails, and possible passwords for those accounts if you use the same password for those accounts as you signed up with. In addition, providing your PayPal or Payza account information could put you at risk.

In addition, they also track referrals. This could provide them with a way to spam your email account as pretending to be someone you know since they know names and who referred who. They can also send you phishing emails pretending to be PayPal or Payza trying to get you to reveal additional important account information.

Reasons for my distrust:
Don't provide company contact information
Servers hosted in Germany (or Ukraine)
Do not account for US tax requirements and regulations
Poor grammar used through out the site
Russian language used on the site
Fishy revenue model
The thought that Russians are going to pay you money to read English articles